Sin is nothing masquerading as something.  Sin merely preys on something, on anything, but itself it is nothing.  Sin produces desire for what doesn’t exist.  It takes what is good, adds NOTHING to it, nothing but disordered desire, and, BAM, now there is something new, something disfigured and ugly.  Wanton desires warp creation (what is good) and makes something less of it (which is evil).

This is the gist of the sermon on Sunday, at Life on the Vine, on Romans 7: 7-13.  Sin took the good Law and produced disordered desires, covetousness.  But of itself it could do nothing, because it is nothing.  God only created what is good.  And sin is turning away from what actually exists, for what we want to exist. It is Nothing that wants to be Something.

Sin says what actually exists is not good enough.  That God is being stingy in His gifts.  That He is unfairly withholding from us the knowledge of good and evil.  The original lie of the Serpent is not “You will surely not die,” but rather, “What exists is not enough for you.  Desire more!”  In this way the Devil is the originator of the infomercial.  But the truth of the gospel is that God is enough for us, that what exist is good, and that if we could only see what is right before us that we could indeed live with God.

But the problem is that we can’t see what exists, and so the author of existence entered existence, and endured the Nothing of Death, so that we could re-enter the Something of Life.  And this is the great mystery of Lent, and the life of Christ, that now, after the Fall, the only way back to the fullness of life, the only way back to the abundance of all Something, is through the passage of Nothingness, the daily dying to the disordered desires and our false selves, the picking up of our crosses which make nothing out of our mis-created somethings.

He most identified with the picture to the left.  For the season of Lent, one of our artists here at Life on the Vine constructed a wall separating us from the altar, and on the top was a giant sign saying, “Separate.”  On the wall hangs four pictures indicating various ways of being separated: a storm, an abandoned woman, a shipwreck, and this painting by surrealist Rene Magrite (La reproduction interdite, French for “The Forbidden Reproduction“).

This is the picture that one of our youths preparing for baptism most identified with at this point in his spiritual journey.  He felt like he could never see himself, that he couldn’t understand himself, didn’t know why he acted the way he did.  We prayed for a while that Christ would help him to see his own face, and see it in the face of Christ.  It was really the only breakthrough I’ve had with this boys who feels abandoned and broke, struggling with Aspergers (which results in his acting out), disconnected from God.

Like this painting, the season of Lent calls us to look deeply at ourselves, but often the first step is to recognize that often we can’t even really see ourselves.  We look into a mirror and all we see is the back of our heads.  And this is frequently a result of our own choosing because we are afraid of what we might see.  Augustine says of God’s work in his life:

You took me from behind my own back, where I had placed myself because I did not wish to look upon myself.  You stood me face to face with myself, so that I might see how foul I was, how deformed and defiled, how covered with stain and sores. (Confessions, VIII, 7)

Only the Spirit of Christ can take us “from behind our own backs” and place us before ourselves.  Will you, this Lent, seek to see yourself as you really are, deformed and defiled, so that you might be seen as you are in Christ, healed and holy?

I’ve seen a Dying Eye
Run round and round a Room—
In serach of Something—as it seemed—
Then Cloudier become—
And then—obscure with Fog—
And then—be soldered down
Without disclosing what it be
‘Twere blessed to have seen—

(#547, Emily Dickinson)

I haven’t died yet; but I’ve died thousands of times.  Sometimes to addictions.  Sometimes to fears.  Most often to pride.  It seems that my pride has more than nine lives, so I have to keep dying to it.  Sometimes I die to dreams that I have dreamed for myself, or others.  I have had to die to the image that I keep of myself, that I attempt to hold before others.

But with each death something is discovered, found, seen.  But it is often hard to explain to those who have yet to died.  As Dickinson says, what the dying Eye can see we cannot see unless we too do die.

Lent is this practice of dying.  And with it come glimpses of life.